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I decided to take the bait and accept the free upgrade offer from Microsoft on my wife's computer. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I had heard some good things about it. I have only run Windows 8 in a VM and did not enjoy it very much, but I can say my first impressions of Windows 10 are overall positive.

Last week Ubuntu 15.04 was released. Ubuntu follows a bi-annual release cycle, with one release in April and one in October (so the releases this year will be 15.04 and 15.10, next year will be 16.04 and 16.10, etc.) The name for this release is Vivid Vervet.

I had owned a Dell XPS 15 (L502X) laptop for a few years. The machine came with a 2nd generation i7 and a discrete NVIDIA GT 540M graphics card. The optimus technology was a pain to get working on Ubuntu, and it never really performed well. Sometimes I would spend days or weeks with display issues going unresolved. I also had various hardware issues with the graphics card, the webcam was unreliable, the 5400 RPM HDD was slow, and the spacebar on the keyboard would get stuck. I vowed never to buy from Dell again and was pointed to System76, a company that makes laptops optimised for Ubuntu.